Friday, March 29, 2013

Are they kidding?

I
dragged my heels for a long time on seeing Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, but it was hard not to succumb once he won the best
director Oscar for it; the film is still playing in some theaters after five
months, even though it’s now available on DVD and on-demand. As the world
knows, it’s based on the novel by Yann Martel: I haven’t read it, which might
have been an advantage, if it meant an ability to view the film through fresh
eyes.

Life of
Pi

The
centerpiece of the film depicts how the teenage Pi survives for months in a
lifeboat after a shipwreck, sharing the space with a Bengal tiger. Lee has
talked about how long it took to get the technology to the point where the
animal could be rendered convincingly, and in this regard the film’s a significant
success – the tiger, along with various other animals of shorter-lived tenure,
is extraordinarily convincing, seldom showing signs either of digital trickery
or of soft-hearted anthropomorphism. This is no doubt Exhibit A in the case for
Lee’s award.

From
my perspective, it might be just about the only
exhibit, because everything else about the film is mostly dire. Early on, in a
framing device where the adult Pi tells his story to a visiting writer (in
scenes carrying the soppy ambiance of a Lifetime flick about two guys on a
tentative first date), the story is trailed, several times, as one that’ll make
you “believe in God,” and the preamble to the shipwreck, recounting Pi’s
formative years, is laden with intimations of significance. This starts of
course with his name, short for “Piscine,” which allows both a “quirky”
cultural reference, a scatalogical sounds-like detour, and then in its
shortened form a mystical, canonical harmony. What it all means, I have no idea
(like many things in the movie, maybe it made more sense in the book) but the
film lays it out there as though covering the selection of a new Pope. Indeed,
this is one of those films where no one ever just talks – everything is measured, calibrated, nuanced, and thereby
dead on arrival. Lee has always been known for his supposed sensitivity to
human interactions, but on this evidence that’s disintegrated into goory
affectation.

Then
in the end, as far as I could tell, the narrator abandons the spiritual line,
and the movie becomes a short-lived meditation on the nature of storytelling,
the unknowability of truth, or some such thing. This line of reflection wraps
up almost as soon as it got under way, to no great end that I could see,
culminating in the most unimpactful final minutes I’ve seen in quite a while.

This is
not cinema

Well,
I guess it wasn’t my kind of movie. So, you might say, I should just focus on
the bits I liked. But even there a queasy feeling sets in, from the sense that
you only like bits of Life of Pi for
the same reason you like ingesting crap pumped full of processed sugar. And how
could it be otherwise, given the vastly expensive commercial undertaking it
represents? The cinematographer Christopher Doyle, asked in a recent interview
what he thought about Life of Pi’s
Claudio Miranda winning this year’s Oscar for best cinematography, exploded
into a magnificently profane rant, of which the following is just one heavily
cleaned-up extract: “ I’m sure he’s a wonderful guy and I’m sure he cares
so much, but since 97 per cent of the film is not under his control, what..are
you talking about cinematography, sorry. I’m sorry. I have to be blunt and I
don’t care, you can write it. I think it’s (an) insult to cinematography. I’m
sure he’s a wonderful person, I’m sure he cares so much. But what it says to
the real world is it’s all about us, we have the money, we put the money in,
and we control the image. And I say…Are you..kidding? That’s not
cinematography. That’s control of the image by the powers that be, by the
people that want to control the whole system because they’re all accountants.
You’ve lost cinema. This is not cinema and it’s not cinematography. It’s not
cinematography.”

Doyle admits later in the
interview to not having seen the film, his point being in part one of principled
opposition to digitization. Well, as someone once said, you don’t need to eat
an egg to know it’s rotten. And once in a while, in matters of art as in those
of human behaviour, maybe it shouldn’t be necessary to go any further than “Are
you kidding?” Is this what we value and want to succumb to, irrelevant drivel
about a kid with a silly name, messing round with a tiger with an even sillier
name? Are we meant to be anything other than insulted when we’re fed a cheap
line of calculatingly multi-denominational “spiritual” pandering, and told this
might actually weigh on our metaphysical calculus? Are we meant to be such
idiots that we don’t care if a film makes no visible attempt to engage with the
world we actually live in?

Divine magic

Honestly, I don’t see any
meaningful distinction between Life of Pi
and one of those here today gone tomorrow action atrocities that invests
comparable time and loving care into finding gruesome new ways to kill people.
Whether we’re distracted from reality by violence and sickness, or by soothing
piffle, either way we’re not spending time on anything that might actually inform
and strengthen our engagement with our surroundings. Defenders of the film,
like the Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen,
tell us it “will definitely restore
your faith in the divine magic of the movies.” But Groen, I fear, has been
taken by the same con artists who undermined his “faith” in the first place –
drawn back to the table with a more artful illusion, and so happily opening up
his wallet of superlatives again. Start counting the days until the bubble
bursts for him again, cueing a woebegone “the magic’s gone” weekend opinion
piece.

Writing briefly here about
Lee’s last film Taking Woodstock, I
said this: “a truly great director
would never make something so shallow and slack. The film, depicting the
turmoil surrounding the classic rock festival, certainly has interesting things
going on in the background. But there’s not an iota of personality or texture
to it. It feels like an assembly, never like a piece of cinematic
writing.”Before that he won another
Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, which
of course was inherently more stimulating, even if the film’s real authorial
personality might almost in hindsight be Heath Ledger as much as it was Lee. Either
way, Oscars for two of his last three films constitutes grotesque
over-valuation. I mean, are they kidding?

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).